Sometimes I think it would be really nice if I lived in a world where all the HD programming I want could be grabbed over the air (OTA). Unfortunately, I live in an area, in a country actually, where OTA HDTV is not all that common.

Why? Well then solutions like home-made PVR’s would become available to me as an option. And I could use OTA tuner cards like this one from ATI:

The TV Wonder 650 is based on the Theater 650 chip, including a “motion-adaptive 3D comb filter” as well as noise reduction, and touts the ability to work in Vista systems, even though it’s still questionable whether the rest of your system will. Aside from recording over the air HDTV signals in MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MPEG-4, and WMV9, the card also sports “Avivo image quality enhancements” for those less stunning SD broadcasts. ATI gives you the ability to record / watch two shows simultaneously via the MulTView functionality (if you own two cards, of course), and touts the nifty ThruView technology that displays content in a translucent box as to keep from interfering with all your (presumably) important background tasks.

I’m sure a lot of people in big cities will be taking a look at this solution. Too bad I don’t have this opportunity.

ATI releases TV Wonder 650 OTA HDTV tuner card